If you want to go into space first time on a new vehicle that's never been flown, you want to go with a pro.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67 and that program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us...